IFTF's Future Now draws on research and forecasting at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA think tank specializing in the future of technology, health, and organizational change. It began in September 2003.

I am in India conducting research, and as always amazed by the variety of cell phones and hacks that are available. One of our research partners brought my attention to the fact that many people in India have unlocked iphones, and have jail-breaked their iphones to install 'non-Apple"...

MAS Holdings claims to have built the world's first carbon-neutral garment factory in Sri Lanka. The plant will make underwear for Marks & Spencer in the UK (they also make sexy lingerie for US-based Victoria's Secret).

After discovering a free application that let her Mac laptop display movement like a seismograph, seismologist Elizabeth Cochran of UC Riverside was struck by a pretty good idea: let's turn our laptops into real...

In 2006, we published a Ten Year Forecast perspective called "Dark Mobs". Among other things, that piece argued that repeated top-down efforts to squelch file sharing actually created powerful incentives that drove the technology towards more...

Online playlists are everywhere, some services better than others. As with most things that come in multiple forms on the web, I've messed around with many of them and have found a few favorites. (iMeem is not one of them.) Half of the fun is just browsing and...

BusinessWeek Asia is reporting some genuine news for me - about the growing threat of India's home grown Maoist insurgency, the Naxalite movement, that is starting to bubble over after decades of simmering in the remote countryside. Now that Maoists have overthrown the Nepalese government:

With the rise of recommendation-based music discovery systems like Last.fm and iLike, and the increased importance of friends and contacts as trusted recommendation sources and filters, music discovery is more social than ever. In an attempt to compete with Apple's iPod success, Microsoft has...